Mute, but not to be silenced

She’s introduced only at the end of the opening sequence, when her paternalistic douchebag employer dismisses her with a pat on the head. Thana (Zoë Tamerlis Lund) is a seamstress working in Manhattan’s garment district, her beauty woman-childish, her doe-eyes and pouting lips arresting but do not express confidence or wantonness or any interest in the superabundance of crudely catcalling lechers who form ogling hedgerows everywhere she goes. The epitome of a woman without a voice, Thana is mute. In no way is she “asking for it.” But she gets it. In fact, she gets it twice in the first ten minutes of Ms. 45 (1981), Abel Ferrara’s low-budget rape revenge cult classic, a definitive portrait of pre-Giuliani New York, a feminist exploitation film, if such a hybrid can be reconciled. Drafthouse has re-released the film in theatres (it plays Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Wednesday night) and on home video.

Written by Ferrara’s frequent collaborator Nicholas St. John, the well-calibrated Ms. 45 strikes a compelling balance between artifice—goopey fake blood, outlandish coincidence—with gritty realism—the brilliant location work—and bracing sociological critique—the ubiquity of rapacious males, not limited to but encapsulated by the pair who perpetrate Thana’s consecutive rapes, the first premeditated, the second performed as an afterthought when a robbery is interrupted. The narrative reason for the double-rape is utilitarian: it pushes Thana over the edge and into some fugue state. The rest is opportunity: Thana is able to stun her second rapist before spotting her hot iron—itself a gendered implement, an icon of homemaking—and beating him with it in a shot that would be quoted and grossly expanded upon in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000). Thana then appropriates her assailant’s firearm: the voiceless finds a vehicle for expression. She becomes a ventriloquist, the .45 her dummy. She quietly goes about employing it in a campaign that might initially seem guided by vigilante vision but gradually proves driven by pure misandry. Thana is only able to kill men, so even when a woman picks up a knife, wielding it conspicuously at cock-level, and moves to attack, Thana can’t fire in self-defence. Like the tragically programmed titular animal in Sam Fuller’s White Dog (1982), transformative trauma renders Thana single-minded in her deployment of violence.

As noted, Ms. 45 has been quoted, and it is itself riddled with quotes, from the obvious—Thana mirror poses with her gun recall Taxi Driver (1976)—to the curious—one shot recreates the poster tableau from Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)—to the provocative—scenes of dead body disposal and blood swirling down the drain recall Psycho (1960), and make us wonder if Thana isn’t to be regarded as some variation on Marion Crane, who this time around survives her attack but never recovers her wits. The film is a composite of politics, cinephilia and an almost documentary sense of place: the shit-faced panhandlers, the trash-strewn alleys and abandoned boxes butted up against aluminium fences, the bat-shit busybody landlady, the pimps shaking down their ladies for ostensibly hidden reserves. Young Ferrara—who, incidentally, has a cameo as Thana’s first rapist (!)—exhibits remarkable control over all of these resources while fully surrendering to the inherent trashy outrageousness of the material—a meat-grinder will make a memorable appearance. The striking Tamerlis Lund, meanwhile, is perfect, her fear near-palpable, her character sympathetic but not to be identified with. Tamerlis Lund had a woefully abbreviated career, one that included co-writing the script for Ferrara’s sleaze masterpiece Bad Lieutenant (1992). She died in 1999, at age 37, from heart failure prompted by cocaine use. She appeared on screen precious few times, but Thana is enough to burn her face into your memory forever. 

                       

What's in a name?

A man walks down a country road. Let’s say he’s middle-aged, but this is Victorian England, and that period had a way of making men from the struggling class middle-aged with one foot in the grave. The man—his name is Durbyfield—stops to converse with a parson, who casually informs him of a recent discovery he made: the Durbyfields are descendants of the d’Urbervilles, and thus connected to the old aristocracy. The clan’s all but died out, the money and property long gone, but that name: it changes the man’s identity in a moment. More importantly, it will radically alter the destiny of the man’s daughter, our story’s tragic heroine.

Names. We’re talking about Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the adaptation directed by Roman Polanski, produced by Claude Berri, and starring Nastassja Kinski. That’s one Pole, one Frenchman and one German taking control of a much beloved, terribly English literary classic. The Brits were not happy when they heard the news, nor when they learned that Polanski would film Tess (1979) not in Hardy’s Dorset, but rather in Brittany. The fact that Polanski, a fugitive by then, might have faced extradition if he went to the U.K. surely had something to do with the choice of location, but the truth is that Brittany felt much closer to Victorian Dorset than the Dorset of the ’70s; that Polanski’s childhood experiences, hiding his Jewishness and living in rural Poland during the war that stole his parents and murdered his mother (she died in Auschwitz), granted him an ability to relate to Tess in ways your average bankable director couldn’t (what’s more, Polanski was first given Hardy’s novel by his wife Sharon Tate, just before she was murdered); and Kinski, still in her teens when production began, not only had precisely the look that Hardy carefully detailed in the novel, but also had an innate intelligence and an instinct for conveying Tess’ brutal accumulation of hardships, which include manipulation, rape, heartbreak, gruelling labour and persecution, some of which Kinski herself, as the much neglected daughter of German actor Klaus Kinski, would have understood. (Weighed against all she brings to the role, Kinski’s variable accent seems forgivable.) All this to say that we’re talking about an adaptation as extraordinary as it is unlikely, a meticulous, transporting, painterly film, drawing upon the work of George de la Tour and Gustave Courbet and photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet with an alluring mix of natural elements and obvious artifice, that tells a story about how names can mean everything and nothing. Tess is now available from Criterion in a dual format DVD/Blu-ray set. 

“You were one person, now you’re another.” So says Angel Clare (Peter Firth), this chump Tess falls for, a guy who can’t bear the fact that Tess has a past, who basically punishes her for being a victim. A chump, yet Angel is also correct—Tess is, in a sense, another person. She was another person when she was Tess Durbyville; another person when she met Alec d’Urberville (Leigh Lawson), the creep who bought her family name and used it to seduce her, and when the seduction didn’t take, rape her; another person when she found something like love; another person when she herself finally commits a heinous act. (Henious, but also a saint? There’s a scene where, if you look carefully, you’ll notice a halo around Tess’ head created by a steam engine.) Identity is fluid in Tess—another theme Polanski would have understood well. For some insight into just how well, check out the episode of The South Bank Show included in Criterion’s supplements. It’s a wide-ranging, nearly hour-long interview with the director at a very particular moment in his often troubled, often troubling, often brilliant career.  

                

The intimate apocalypse

This is the way the world ends, not with an asteroid or waves of contagion, but with an aborted cab ride. At least that’s how it ended in South Korea in 2010, when writer/director/editor Jo Sung-hee made his impressive feature debut with End of Animal, a hugely resourceful, super fucking weird chamber disaster drama. The film got less play on the festival circuit than it should have, though its reputation did grease the wheels for Jo’s solid, if less inventive, 2012 follow-up A Werewolf Boy. It was released on DVD earlier this year. I finally caught up with it last week. 

A very pregnant young woman, Sun-yeong (Lee Min-Ji), is traveling by taxi from Seoul to her mother’s home somewhere in the countryside, where she plans to give birth. Somewhere en route, in the middle of nowhere, the cabbie stops for some regular-looking dude in a parka and ball cap—turns out he’s going the same way. But once said dude climbs in, things get tense. He’s touchy, and keeps ordering Sun-yeong not to stare at him, even though she’s in the back seat.  He starts announcing the number of seconds to go… until what? Then he says he has no cash or cards to pay. Then he starts to make uncanny guesses about numerous aspects of the personal lives of the cabbie and Sun-yeong. Then he starts talking angels with fangs and global blackouts. He then tells cabbie and Sun-yeong that he loves them, just before a flash of light startles everyone and knocks Sun-yeong unconscious.

When she wakes up: no cabbie, no touchy, psychic stranger. Just her and her unborn child in that seemingly endless desolate landscape. No mobile service. No nothing. She starts to search for a rest area that’s meant to be nearby. She’s starving. She finds an insolent kid in an abandoned house. She badly injures her foot. She meets a bickering couple. She’s aided by a goofy guy in track pants riding a bike—never trust a man in track pants. She nearly gets raped. Once in a while she gets instructions from the psychic stranger via radio signals—he’s the only thing on the air. At times, from across the wintry plain, she hears some sort of growling, freaky and hard to identify. Is this unseen animal going to be the end of her?

Despite the sweeping nature of the premise, Jo knows he’s not making a spectacle film of any sort. His camera most often sticks very close to his characters, often to just head and shoulders. Occasionally we get a wider view of the landscape. End of Animal is an intimate apocalypse. This is its novelty and strength as well as the source of its failings—which should not deter the intrigued from seeing it. It’s just that, however sympathetic her position may be, Sun-yeong winds up grating on you a bit. She’s having a rough time of it, and she whimpers, cries and screams an awful lot. End of Animal is at once fascinating and annoying. It’s probably too long, but it’s also a hell of a strange world to visit, one on its last legs, or simply waiting for something new.   

         

Through the past, very, very darkly

I have rarely experienced a film at once so very good and so despairing. Each sequence of The Act of Killing struck me as vital, incisive, edited so as to contribute to the film’s immense cumulative power. And in the case of nearly every sequence, I couldn’t wait for it to end. That’s not a backhanded compliment. Texas-born, UK-based Joshua Oppenheimer’s wildly idiosyncratic documentary about the massacre of as many as 2.5 million supposed Indonesian communists in the wake of the 1965 overthrow of President Sukarno is innovative, challenging and perversely brilliant. It yields a flood of insights into the proliferation of evil in a permissive environment—among its executive producers are Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. It is often very funny in a horrendous sort of way. It’s one of the best films you’ll see this year, easily. It’s simply hard to take if you try to maintain any faith in human goodness. It is a sustained gaze into the abyss.

The operating premise is a stroke of genius. Oppenheimer located some men, self-described gangsters, who were key players in the mass murders. Learning of how they remain proud of their actions, how they have remained revered public figures in Indonesia and even held public office, and—this is essential—how they love the movies, Oppenheimer offered to facilitate their writing, directing and acting in reenactments of their ostensible glory days. The Act of Killing, thankfully, is not the mere fruit of their amateur labours; rather, it’s best summed up as Oppenheimer’s “making of.” It surveys the process of casting and re-staging atrocities, and the very gradual effect that this process has on one man in particular: Anwar Congo, who can seem like a gentle paternal figure one moment—he invites his grandsons to come watch him play one of his own victims, despite the fact that his role in the scene has clearly, perhaps irreversibly, traumatized him—and the next brag about how he was so much more sadistic than the Nazis. He’s not exaggerating.

There are in The Act of Killing clips from a TV talk show in which the cheerful host interviews Congo and others about their movie project, and, while perfectly real, it is astoundingly close to Oliver Stone levels of satire. There’s a scene in which a man recruited to play a torture victim relays a personal memory of his stepfather’s abduction and slaughter; he smiles all the while and is careful to iterate that he’s no communist. When they shoot his scene his performance feels unbearably real. There’s a scene in which members of the still powerful Pancasila Youth paramilitary group help to reenact the total destruction of a village, and one of the Pancasila members flatly declares how content he is to rape anything that moves—especially if it’s under 14. But the most important sequence is saved for the close of The Act of Killing, when Congo, having reached the end of his cinematic stroll down memory lane, returns to a balcony where he murdered countless victims. His hair has turned white, and as he shuffles around the space he is twice overcome with the overwhelming need to vomit. He doubles over and makes the most horrific noises, but he just can’t seem to let the vomit come. Probably because he’s afraid that, if he does, it might never stop.